I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis
Mitchell Hashimoto warns of 'AI psychosis' at companies where teams justify shipping bugs because agents will fix them instantly.
Deep dive
- Mitchell Hashimoto warns companies are in 'AI psychosis' where rational conversations about AI development practices are impossible, including personal friends he respects
- Teams justify shipping bugs with 'agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do'
- This mirrors the MTBF vs MTTR reckoning during cloud infrastructure transitions, but now affects the entire software development industry
- When concerns are raised, teams dismiss them with incomplete metrics: 'full test coverage', 'bug reports are going down'
- Infrastructure taught that you can 'automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine'
- Systems appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible
- Bug reports decline while latent risk explodes; test coverage rises while semantic understanding falls
- Changes happen so fast that underlying architecture decay goes unnoticed
- Hashimoto learned from infrastructure that MTTR is valuable but you cannot abandon resilient system design entirely
- The issue affects people he knows personally, making it difficult to address without immediate dismissals
Decoder
- MTBF (Mean-Time-Between-Failure): Infrastructure reliability metric measuring average time a system runs before breaking, prioritizing failure prevention through robust design.
- MTTR (Mean-Time-To-Recovery): Infrastructure reliability metric measuring how quickly service is restored after failure, prioritizing rapid automated fixes over preventing failures.
- Resilient catastrophe machine: System that appears healthy by local monitoring but has become globally incomprehensible through excessive automation, accumulating hidden risks that local metrics cannot detect.
Original article
I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.
I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).
It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.
The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.
We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.
I worry.
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